A Green Politician Sees Black Gold In A Blue State

Energy: California wrote the script for renewables, but its governor talks like an oilman on the subject of fracking. It's not a contradiction, just realism — especially about jobs.

Gov. Jerry Brown yields to no one in his enthusiasm for green energy, but he knows black gold when he sees it. Witness his remarks last Wednesday at an event announcing three new renewable energy projects: "We want to get the greenhouse gas emissions down, but we also want to keep the economy going. That's the balance that's required."

On the subject of hydraulic fracturing (fracking), Brown said that process would be regulated through a process that "listens to people but also wants to take advantage of the great opportunities we have."

The oil industry could not have put it better — and probably would not have put it differently. Brown is an environmentalist, but his eyes are open. He knows that California is sitting on a vast Mother Lode of shale oil that, if tapped, could produce an economic boom in parts of the state that need it most.

The Monterey Shale Formation, estimated to hold some 15 billion barrels of recoverable oil, runs several hundred miles through the middle of the state, roughly following on the western side of the San Joaquin Valley.

In the same week Brown made his comments, a group of University of Southern California researchers and the Communications Institute, a Los Angeles-based think tank, issued a study gauging the formation's economic potential. The numbers are impressive. It found that exploiting Monterey shale could generate up to 2.8 million new jobs and add 14% to the state's GDP in 2020, near the peak of production.

Those jobs would include many outside the oil patch, such as those in industries that produce drilling technology and transport oil. But plenty of employment would be near the drilling — in counties that have some of the highest chronic joblessness in the state.

Brown knows where jobs are needed the most. He might even understand, whether or not he can bring himself to admit it, that oil could do more for the Valley than his beloved high-speed rail boondoggle. His practicality goes only so far, we suppose. But he's more a realist than many on the green side, and it's hard to argue with facts in the ground.

Energy: California wrote the script for renewables, but its governor talks like an oilman on the subject of fracking. It's not a contradiction, just realism — especially about jobs.

Gov. Jerry Brown yields to no one in his enthusiasm for green energy, but he knows black gold when he sees it. Witness his remarks last Wednesday at an event announcing three new renewable energy projects: "We want to get the greenhouse gas emissions down, but we also want to keep the economy going. That's the balance that's required."

On the subject of hydraulic fracturing (fracking), Brown said that process would be regulated through a process that "listens to people but also wants to take advantage of the great opportunities we have."

The oil industry could not have put it better — and probably would not have put it differently. Brown is an environmentalist, but his eyes are open. He knows that California is sitting on a vast Mother Lode of shale oil that, if tapped, could produce an economic boom in parts of the state that need it most.

The Monterey Shale Formation, estimated to hold some 15 billion barrels of recoverable oil, runs several hundred miles through the middle of the state, roughly following on the western side of the San Joaquin Valley.

In the same week Brown made his comments, a group of University of Southern California researchers and the Communications Institute, a Los Angeles-based think tank, issued a study gauging the formation's economic potential. The numbers are impressive. It found that exploiting Monterey shale could generate up to 2.8 million new jobs and add 14% to the state's GDP in 2020, near the peak of production.

Those jobs would include many outside the oil patch, such as those in industries that produce drilling technology and transport oil. But plenty of employment would be near the drilling — in counties that have some of the highest chronic joblessness in the state.

Brown knows where jobs are needed the most. He might even understand, whether or not he can bring himself to admit it, that oil could do more for the Valley than his beloved high-speed rail boondoggle. His practicality goes only so far, we suppose. But he's more a realist than many on the green side, and it's hard to argue with facts in the ground.

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